The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991–2020.Vol.5 of The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine by Mike Ashley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991–2020.Vol.5 of The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine by Mike Ashley Paul Kincaid Going Digital. Mike Ashley. The Rise of the Cyberzines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1991–2020. Vol. 5 of The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine. Liverpool UP, liverpool science fiction texts and studies, 2022. xvi+444 pp. £95 hc. There was a time when I would regularly receive a selection of Best-of-the-Year anthologies to review. This selection would usually include the annual massive volume from Gardner Dozois. And so I read them, carefully, cover to cover, not just the stories but also the introductions. It did not take long to recognize a familiar pattern in these introductions. They would skim lightly across the high or low points of the year: such-and-such was the big publishing event; soand-so died; this thing was controversial; that thing was a popular success; these were the big award winners, and so on. Then at some point Dozois would come on to the business of publishing and it was remarkable how familiar the story was from one year to the next. It would seem sometimes as though the same text could be cut and pasted from one volume to the next, with only a few numbers changed. The magazines had a successful year, but circulations were falling. Circulations were always falling. I am sure that if I were to comb diligently through all thirty-odd volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction I might find occasional instances of a magazine whose circulation increased, but if they exist at all they are rare. Science-fiction magazines seem to have been a slowly dying breed for most of the last half century. It is not just that these magazines seem to be kept alive by some financial alchemy even as income keeps declining at an apparently catastrophic rate, but also that now there is a new threat to their existence. Over the last dozen years or so, a number of online magazines have appeared, such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons,and Uncanny, that, after the usual false starts and hesitations, have proved to be remarkably stable and successful. These online magazines, “cyberzines” as Mike Ashley calls them, have drawn attention away from the print magazines and are now every bit as likely to pick up top-rated contributors and award nominations. And with far lower overheads, they start from a much better position than their print rivals. Even so, readership figures for the best of the cyberzines still barely match the ever-decreasing circulation figures for the print magazines, although I am not sure what metric allows you to compare the two sets of figures fairly. Thus, although there seem to be ever more venues appearing for short fiction and, more often than not, disappearing, and although there seem to be more short stories than ever being published, the market for sf short stories is not particularly healthy. It may be healthier than other genres, but that is not saying a lot. The audience for science fiction gets their fix primarily, I suspect, from television, then from film, then, some distance behind, from novels. The short story is, I would guess, so far behind these three as to be almost out of sight. We have a Romantic myth in science fiction that magazines are integral to the whole story of the genre. It is a myth that harks back to fabled publications such as Amazing, Astounding, F&SF, Galaxy, and New Worlds, back to a time when [End Page 116] there were fewer options for feeding an addiction to science fiction. But that myth has not been true for decades, probably not since the 1960s. I have a feeling that if every sf magazine were to disappear overnight, the vast majority of the consumers of science fiction would not even blink. The history of science fiction can no longer be equated with the history of the magazines; indeed, the story of the magazines forms no more than a curious sidebar to the history of the...